I already told you that after all of the wars we fought around the Middle East the British Army became rather good at finding things to do in olive groves. Well, the RAF wasn’t that bad either, and Fiona was not to be denied her chance to demonstrate it. She found an isolated olive grove not far past Angastina on the Famagusta road, and we sat on the ground, drank a bottle of warm beer each, and nibbled some biscuits she’d brought up from the Keep. I don’t know if she had anything else in mind, but if she did she didn’t say so.
Neither did I. Maybe I was learning that sometimes it’s nice just to be friends. I remembered the little bugger and his knife at Salamis, and couldn’t settle . . . I jumped at every noise. Even so, we got to know each other and smoked and talked, and left as soon as the sun began to dip.
Rolling back down the road to camp I was relaxed. None of the tension I had carried to Kermia with me. When Fiona stopped the Champ outside my quarter in the twilight she left the engine running, so the evening was ending there anyway. I turned in the passenger seat and said, ‘Fiona?’
‘What?’
I reached up, and kissed her cheek. It was dusty.
‘Thanks for coming.’
I liked her laugh.
Pete was sitting on his bed playing patience. He asked, ‘How did it go?’ These bastards always seemed to know my business.
‘Fine. Someone got shot in the hand by one of the local monkeys, but apart from that it was pretty routine. Watson’s new woman drove me there and back.’ I couldn’t remember if Pete had been at the services burial of the finger in ’44, or had missed it during one of his unofficial absences. His game came out. Nearly all the games Pete played did.
‘Wanna find a bar?’
‘No thanks, Pete. I fancy an evening in. Good book, roaring fire and smoke a couple of pipes. Thanks for asking though.’
‘You OK?’
‘Yeah. I told you . . . I just feel tired.’
‘Woman tired?’
‘No. Not woman tired. Just tired.’ He gave me the look, but for once he was wrong. ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘You win. Give me half an hour to clean up and we’ll find somewhere to drink.’
Be careful what you wish for. Isn’t that what they say?
The roaring fire I’d longed for broke out in the cookhouse a little later. It was blamed on a waiter who’d been sacked for stealing sugar, and decided to become a hero of the revolution instead . . . We were all turned out to fight it. Not a bloody chance. The kitchen block was full of cans of fat and cooking oils, which exploded like bombs. The wooden building burned better than a Guy Fawkes bonfire. By the time I was trudging back to the billet between Pat Tobin and Pete we each had soot stains on our arms and faces and clothes, and nowhere to have breakfast.
‘I have a proper bottle of whisky – my boss gave it to me as an embarkation present,’ I told them. ‘What say we arsehole it?’
Pete grinned, but it didn’t seem to lift Pat’s spirits. Something was biting him.
Chapter Fifteen
The Lone Rider of Santa Fe
Warboys. I was sitting on the step of my billet reading Moby-Dick – a copy from the camp library. The step was in a nice slab of shade, and there was a bit of a breeze from somewhere. Warboys drove past alone in his little lorry, heading for Watson’s cricket pavilion. He waved as he went past. His truck stirred up the dust.
He returned an hour later, stopped and switched the engine off. It sounded as if it was a much better power plant than that in Pickles’s Auster. Maybe they should have started bunging Humber engines in their aircraft. The engine block ticked as it cooled. He didn’t get down from the cab. I took my pipe from my mouth.
Warboys said, ‘Your boss said you had a couple of days off. What are you going to do?’
I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t particularly want to go into Famagusta. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go to Tony’s – I couldn’t think of anything better than lazing under one of Yassine’s fans with a glass of Keo in front of me. The problem was that if I didn’t run into Steve, I’d run into Alison, and I didn’t want to be responsible for an atmosphere of spectral doom.
‘Nothing planned. I’m enjoying my book, and not having to work.’ I waved my pipe at him.
‘Fancy seeing a couple of castles?’
‘Come again?’
‘I’ve a few days off myself, as it happens. I’ve been sketching the castles on the island in my spare time. I wanted to go back to Kyrenia and St Hilarion. I wouldn’t mind the company, if you were interested.’
He made the offer the way men always do; as if a rejection wouldn’t matter.
‘Can I get some pipe tobacco in Kyrenia?’ I asked.
‘I know a place where you can get anything.’
‘Then I can pack in five minutes.’
We headed back towards Nicosia on the road that I had driven with Fiona the day before. On Cyprus, Nic is like Rome: all roads lead to it. I asked him about sketching castles.
‘Not only sketches,’ he told me. ‘I’m making architectural drawings and schemes. I plan to do a book on the Cypriot castles one day. I met a mad novelist in a bar, and he encouraged me.’
‘Bully for him. Wasn’t that what T. E. Lawrence was doing when he joined the army and got into trouble?’
‘Yes, he was drawing Crusader castles in the Holy Land. One of my heroes.’
‘I feared that.’
‘Meaning?’
‘He was an idiot.’
He smiled. He didn’t take his eyes off the road when he drove. I liked that in a driver. He asked me, ‘How do you make that out?’
‘He promised Arabia to the Arabs, and then helped give it to the French – they’ll never forgive us for that. Then he fell off his motorbike and killed himself. The man was an idiot.’
‘He wrote a wonderful book by all accounts.’
‘He wrote an unreadable book. I know – I tried it. All of the would be’s if they could be’s were reading it in the Canal Zone. Anyone who tells you it was a good book is just trying to show you how terribly intellectual they are. Lawrence couldn’t spell, and his editor didn’t even bloody try.’ Warboys seemed amused by the way the conversation was going; I thought I ought to finish by keeping him on side. ‘Don’t worry about it. You probably wouldn’t like the books I read either.’
‘What do you read?’
‘The Americans mainly. The language is dead and buried in Britain or the colonies – the Americans are the only ones keeping it alive. Hemingway and Steinbeck, Spillane and Chandler – people like that.’
‘Weren’t they a colony once?’
‘Yeah, but they got out because they didn’t like the books we were writing.’
Warboys laughed again. I was sure that he had gone to school at one of the places where they have fags, instead of smoking them.
‘Who would be a good American writer to start on, in your opinion?’
‘Zane Grey or Holly Martins.’
‘Never heard of them – interesting names though. Ready for a coffee stop? I know a tidy little Turkish café in North Nicosia.’
‘That’s a very good idea, Tony. Perhaps a decent coffee will stop me sounding so much like a berk.’ It was a word we used in the fifties; it meant fool.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Keep going. I like being challenged.’
The coffee was as good as he promised, and he was able to park the wagon where he could keep his eye on it. The café – Café Truva – was on a big, sun-splashed cobbled square, looked down on by old three-storeyed buildings. Washing strung across the streets like flags. Five roads led into the square, or more importantly out of it. I suspected that this fact figured in Warboys’s choices. We stood up at a high aluminium bar, swallowed a coffee each, and pushed our cups back for a refill. It was like drinking an electric shock.
‘I don’t quite know why I was beginning to sound so angry, Tony. I think it was something to do with your speaking voice.’
‘How do I sound?’
>
‘Like an upper-class berk: I’m a lower-class berk. Where did you go to school?’
‘Guess.’
‘Somewhere very expensive.’
‘Wrong. Round the corner. This is my home patch, old son. The English School in Nicosia . . . T-E-S, as it’s known over here. My old man was in the Foreign Office, and was out here ten years or more.’
‘I don’t suppose he knew someone called Carlton Browne?’
‘Old CB? Course we did. Everyone knows him.’
Ah. I knew there was something. There’s always a little bloody something.
‘So you knew I was coming out here?’
He didn’t reply. He just smiled his best smile, and hoped to get away with it.
He said, ‘You needed tobacco, you said? Why don’t you pop through there, and see if my friend Alev here can help you?’ Alev was a tall, bony Turk with an outrageously naked upper lip: he probably wanted to stand out from the crowd.
There was a bead curtain shielding an arched doorway. I elbowed my way through it and found myself in a large room like a warehouse, full of life’s little necessities. I hadn’t seen anything like it before, not even a country Co-op . . . and I couldn’t believe in the three two-ounce tins of Sweet Chestnut Flake I shortly found in my hands – it was difficult enough to get it in Blighty! McVitie’s Digestives, Callard & Bowser Creamline Toffees, Liquorice Allsorts and Wine Gums . . . and those new-fangled drip-dry shirts you never had to iron. An Aladdin’s fucking cave. There was even a pile of dog-eared English paperbacked novels.
I walked back to Warboys having done a deal for the tobacco, two shirts and a case of Watney’s beer.
‘Where the hell does he get this stuff?’ I asked him. ‘There’s a king’s fortune in there.’
‘I steer him in the right direction. Your pal Pat mostly – he won’t mind me telling you.’
‘What about the police?’
‘The civvies raid us now and again, but we always get a warning, and send them away with a few cartons of fags to keep them happy. Old Collins leaves us alone – he knows I work out of here.’
‘And Alev here,’ I indicated the tall, calm man who seemed to run the place and who had followed me out, ‘is peculiarly discreet, I suppose?’
That bloody smile for all the world again. Warboys said, ‘It’s this way, Charlie. My mother died when we were still here. I was about four. My father sought consolation in the arms of others – a surprising number, if the truth be told – so Alev is actually my kid brother.’ I should have spotted the resemblance: it was there if you looked for it. The two brothers then gave each other the hug they’d been holding back. ‘Alev is a comrade,’ Warboys continued. ‘He wants a free Turkish republican state in Northern Cyprus after the British leave.’
‘And I suppose you’ve promised it to them?’
‘Yes, and with all my heart. They will be free of these bloody Greeks, or I’ll die trying.’
There was just that moment. That gleam of the fanatic in his eyes. Bloody Lawrence again; why couldn’t he have stayed at home, and written learned monographs about Templar castles? Fuck it!
Alev gave me a hug as well before we drove away. In the cab of the truck I recalled something that Warboys had said.
‘Tony?’
‘Yes?’
‘When you were telling me who Alev was, you used the word comrade.’
‘That’s right, old son. Alev is a comrade . . . just like you and me.’ Bollocks. A Turkish freedom fighter, a throwback to the days of empire, and reluctant Red Charlie. We’ll keep the Red flag flying here. My dad would have liked this. What I really thought was, What have you got yourself into now, you fool? And, then, after I had worked it out – Bollocks! Again.
We passed Kermia: the road wound past it. Another ambulance stood beside the flying control tent. A sadly misused Auster was sitting on its side at one end of the tarmac – a wing had been ripped off but it hadn’t burned. They must have been having a run of bad luck. Just before we started to climb up into the Kyrenia range Warboys pulled over so that we could have a drink. He fished a couple of warm bottles of Keo from under his seat.
‘Don’t worry, old son. We’re off duty, ain’t we?’ I gave him the second-hand book I’d bought for him from Alev’s library. It was Holly Martins’s The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. I think he was genuinely touched by the gesture. He riffled the pages before he put it in his small pack. ‘Very nice of you, old son. I shall enjoy it.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘I’ll give it back when I’ve finished it.’
‘Don’t bother: I’ve read it – pass it on.’
‘Right you are. Ready to go? We’re only half an hour from St Hilarion now.’
St Hilarion sits at the top of a mountain pinnacle commanding the plain to the south, and the road which runs north to south between Kyrenia and Nicosia. The people who built it were probably very nice people, although a lot of them were Venetian, so you never know. Only three good things ever came out of Venice: proper drinking chocolate, the ombra, and girls in dominoes lifting their skirts in dark alleys during a Festival of Fools. I met a Venetian a few years ago who boasted that Venice was the true father of international banking: I suppose that says it all, really. Anyway, the Venetians had a lot to do with how St Hilarion looks today: crouched narrow on a mountain top, like the petrified skeleton of a constipated vulture. It’s made of stone all right, and kind of droopy . . . but you can’t mistake the air of tension in the architecture.
The castle is supposed to have been an inspiration for Walt Disney when he was making Snow White, so remind me never to visit Orlando. The road up to the damned place is narrow, cutting past precipice and pass, and narrowing to widths that even a naked cyclist would shrink from. Warboys sprinted us up it as if he was driving in the Monte Carlo Rally.
Maybe that was something to do with getting away from what looked like a lorryload of armed Afghan tribesmen, who were trying desperately to keep up with us. I looked nervously over my shoulder and told him, ‘Don’t look now, but I think we’re being followed.’ I think I’d borrowed the line from Dick Barton.
‘Don’t worry, they can’t get past.’
‘But don’t we have to get back down past them?’
‘Good point. Should have thought about it.’ I think he was about to laugh.
‘And what happens when they get within rifle range?’
‘They already are. You worry too much, Charlie. If they were going to bang off at us they would have started before now.’
It was good to be in the hands of a professional, as the gardener said to . . . OK, so you’ve heard that one before.
There was another truckload of shaggy armed tribesmen barring the gatehouse to the castle when we reached it, but they didn’t look quite the same. There was a qualitative difference between the ones chasing us, and the ones in our way, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. They let us through, and into the castle, but moved to block the lorry following us. It stopped, and the two groups did the head-to-head thing. They blew the horns of their vehicles in protest against each other, and then fired their rifles in the air.
‘It’s like dealing with children,’ Warboys told me. ‘How on earth are they going to run the show when they have independence, and have to manage their own affairs?’
‘Wait a couple of mins until my heart has slowed down, Tony. Then you can explain in simple words what’s going on.’
He pulled us to a halt in the shadow of a crumbling wall just inside the main castle court. It was narrow, like the fortress, and followed the line of the rock it sat on. Looking down into the plain I could clearly see two birds of prey circling high over the tents at Kermia: the lads had better watch out for their dinners.
Warboys whistled a tune. The first bars of ‘The Red Flag’. He was probably only doing it to annoy the Greeks, who had taken a political position somewhat to the Right of Oswald Moseley. What’s modern Greek for ‘Hurrah for the Black-shirts’?
‘The lorry behind us is full of TC resistance men, Charlie – the TMT. They are resisting the Greeks, and they are here to look after us. The ones who let us through into the castle are EOKA GCs. They’re the enemy – they’re resisting us.’
‘Then aren’t we on the wrong side of this fight?’
‘Who said it was a fight, old son? We’re just coming to lunch.’
There was a table in the sun in the middle of the court. It had a white tablecloth, and was set with three places. The chairs looked rustic and solid. A mixture of breads, fruits, meats and cheeses climbed around bottles of white wine which still bore the beads of the water they had been cooled in. The man waiting for us, a priest, stood, smiled, and opened his arms. Tony Warboys accepted the invitation, and they hugged each other. I wasn’t as surprised as I had been the first time, although all the men hugging each other on this bloody island would eventually get me down. Warboys said, ‘Hello, Adonis.’
‘Hello, Tony,’ from the priest. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Starving. Did you bring your mother’s olives?’
‘She insisted – and gave me a bottle for you to take away. She sends her love.’
‘My father would have sent his greetings if he knew we were about to meet again.’
Too bloody much.
‘Another one of your brothers?’ I asked Warboys.
They both laughed. I suppose that was better than one of them throwing a pink canary.
‘No.’ It was the priest who spoke as he smiled. ‘My mother is much too sensible for that. Tony and I were at school together – TES. We studied in each other’s houses. He helped me with Latin, and my father taught him Greek.’ Then he gave me a shrewd sort of look and said, ‘You must be Charles Bassett, the radio man.’
Betrayal is a very odd thing. Although it creeps up on you slowly and unnoticed, when it happens, it happens very fast. Bastard. We were sitting down by then. The priest was offering me a glass of wine. I half stood, and swung on Warboys demanding, ‘Why did you bring me here, you bastard?’ Might as well use the word.
The shrewd look was from Tony this time. He said, ‘Because they asked me to. Sit down again, and eat your lunch. They’ll be offended if you don’t.’
A Blind Man's War Page 25
